R.I. innovators: 11 trailblazers to follow in 2017

Tuesday

Jan 3, 2017 at 12:01 AMJan 3, 2017 at 10:35 PM

Rhode Islanders with big ideas are finding new ways to develop products, devices, applications, computer models, methods and policies that are solving problems in business, education, the arts, government and health care. The changes will strengthen the economy, improve schools and better the quality of life. We highlight 11 R.I. innovators to keep your eye on this year.

Journal Staff

Rhode Island is changing.

People with big ideas are finding new ways to develop products, devices, applications, computer models, methods and policies that are solving problems in business, education, the arts, government and health care. The changes will strengthen the economy, improve schools and better the quality of life.

Here are 11 innovators to keep your eye on this year.

Understanding epidemics

Brandon Marshall

PROVIDENCE — Brandon Marshall is what might be called an epidemic forecaster. His predictions could save thousands of Rhode Islanders’ lives.

The 33-year-old epidemiologist and assistant professor at the Brown University School of Public Health develops sophisticated computer models to predict how different treatment policies will affect the trajectory of health epidemics.

Marshall, who is Canadian, did his postdoctoral research at Columbia University in New York City and came to Brown in 2012. His work focuses on some of the country’s most pressing public-health epidemics: HIV, hepatitis C and opioid overdoses.

"What modeling gives us is the ability to test different hypothetical scenarios," he said. "A model tells you every year how many people you need to treat … to essentially eliminate’’ an epidemic.

Consider hepatitis C, the most common blood-borne infection in the country, afflicting some 3.2 million Americans — including an estimated 16,600 to 22,660 Rhode Islanders. The infection rate has soared with the rise in use of prescription opioids and heroin, both of which can be injected with needles that are shared.

Marshall collaborated with computer scientists to develop a program that shows how many patients would have to be treated annually — and for how many years — to curb or essentially wipe out hepatitis C. It’s the type of evidence-based data that policymakers need to make informed public policy decisions.

The next frontier is the opioid epidemic. Marshall is director of Rhode Island’s overdose prevention surveillance system, which collects and maps opioid overdose deaths using data from the state Department of Health. Marshall said he plans to use computer modeling to forecast how many lives could be save with targeted distributions of naloxone, an overdose-prevention medication.

— Lynn Arditi

Furniture, not frustration

John Humphrey

PROVIDENCE — With his freshly-inked MBA, John Humphrey could have stuck with the venture-capital job he landed in Florida. Or he could have relented to pleas to come home to Rhode Island and join the family mill.

Instead, the Tiverton native and Portsmouth Abbey graduate decided to strike out on his own by moving to Providence in 2013 and creating a new furniture business model.

Three years later, his start-up, Greycork, has a small showroom and office on Thayer Street and a warehouse in Olneyville. Its reasonably priced and space-saving couches, chaises and bookshelves are regularly shipped to young city dwellers in Los Angeles, New York, Seattle and San Francisco.

Humphrey, 28, wanted to offer an alternative to traditional big-box stores with big pieces of furniture and also to Ikea with its line of assemble-at-home products with a reputation for being lower in quality and not always so easy to assemble. He also wanted to sell online and directly to consumers by keeping shipping costs down.

"I had that light-bulb moment," he says.

It happened when he sought to apply his years working at the family business, door and frame maker Horner Millwork, of Somerset, Massachusetts. With materials bought at Home Depot, he designed a prototype coffee table that could be assembled in five minutes. Soon he teamed up with Bruce Kim, a graduating student at Rhode Island School of Design, and together they began designing furniture made of solid wood, Baltic birch.

Greycork got its start with a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo that raised $270,313 in 2015 by taking pre-orders on its furniture. Humphrey's team is now seeking to expand its products.

— Rich Salit

Connecting the dots

Taino J. Palermo

PROVIDENCE – In post-industrial America, the time-honored ideas of community are antiquated. Replacing them with daring, creative public policies and initiatives is the path to the future — for everyone, regardless of demographic or social status.

That is the essence of the philosophy espoused by Taino J. Palermo, program director, community development, at Roger Williams University’s School of Continuing Studies.

"What we look at is how cities, how towns, how neighborhoods, are developed; have been developed historically, and what that looks like moving forward," Palermo says. "Everything is tied to community development: public safety, economics, health, housing."

Palermo knows whereof he speaks. He arrived in Rhode Island after community organizing, consulting and study in Philadelphia, Boston, and Syracuse, New York, among other cities. He grew up in a military family in the Bronx and earned a bachelor’s degree from the College of Mount Saint Vincent in Riverdale, New York, and master’s and doctoral degrees from Jones International University in Centennial, Colorado.

Palermo brings his vision to middle school and high school students, along with those at Roger Williams. According to the university website, he has begun or directed "nonprofit organizations specializing in the arts, education, social services, community development and economic development ... [and] has a history, personally and professionally, of advocating for underrepresented communities and urban youth."

Palermo is married to Daniella Palermo, a member of the Class of 2018 Adult Psychiatry Residency Training Program at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University.

"We love it here," he says. "This is where we’re going to start a family and settle down."

— G. Wayne Miller

'Pay what you want'

Elizabeth Collins

NORTH KINGSTOWN — Elizabeth Collins stands at her easel, her paintbrush roaming the canvas in colorful but seemingly random motion. A splash here, a daub there, some extra attention down in this corner. Her style, not to mention her marketing, is nothing if not innovative.

Chances are, you have never seen anything quite like her acrylics, although with their abstract-expressionist feel, they do evoke Jackson Pollock.

"I start with sort of an 'under-painting,' usually just large swaths of color," Collins says. "And then each layer is applied individually, and I choose the paint brush or dotting tool or whatever. I don’t make any choices in advance about what the next layer is going to be."

There are many next layers — sometimes, dozens or more. A single painting can take weeks to complete.

A graduate of the University of Rhode Island, where she majored in textiles and minored in art, Collins painted at her Jamestown home until last year, when her youngest child entered first grade and she rented a studio in The Mill at Shady Lea artists’ complex — a cozy, productive space.

Collins is also an accomplished photographer, and a painter in more traditional forms. She offers all of her work without price tag.

"It’s kind of nice to have something that you can relate to on a more personal level," Collins says.

— G. Wayne Miller

Education in the world

Suzanne Fogarty

PROVIDENCE — Suzanne Fogarty is all about bringing her girls into the world, whether that entails a trip to India or learning to code.

As the head of the all-girls Lincoln School in Providence, Fogarty, 48, is making sure her students have not only the skills but the mindset to be nimble in a fast-changing workplace. She is also pushing her students to experience people and places that extend well beyond their comfort zone.

"We're pushing our kids out into the world," said Fogarty.

At Lincoln, high school students can study the challenges faced by women in India culminating in a 10-day trip to Mumbai, its largest city, and small villages. In June, high school students will be able to visit and study in Cuba. Eighth-graders spend three days in New York City, where they engage in discussions with alumnae about global human rights.

This spring, the school will break ground on the STEAM Hub for Girls, a $5-million facility that will break down the traditional barriers between the arts and sciences. Students will be able to explore the connections between economics and human rights, calculus and physics, writing and science.

Lincoln students can also take a college-level course, Introduction to Engineering, at Brown University and an architecture class at the Rhode Island School of Design.

"We want to see more of our students begin to close the gaps in industries that are male-dominated," she said.

— Linda Borg

The other green economy

Kevin Hawkins

WARWICK — Pot is Kevin Hawkins’ business, and the pot business is booming, providing a double-entendre for the name of his Warwick Avenue plant store: Grow With Us Hydroponics.

Nationally, billions of dollars in investments are said to be on the sidelines waiting for more states to do what Massachusetts did in November: legalize recreational marijuana. Hawkins hasn’t been waiting around.

The Warwick resident already has ownership interests in four hydroponic stores, which sell plant supplies. (Three stores operate in Rhode Island, one in Southeast Massachusetts.) "Ninety-nine percent" of his customers are growing marijuana as registered patients or caregivers.

With Massachusetts legalizing recreational marijuana, Hawkins expects to have three more Bay State stores open by February and he’s looking to open another one in Las Vegas; Nevada voters also approved recreational pot.

As with any business, "networking is key," says Hawkins, who worked at the state Central Landfill in Johnston and then became a medical marijuana patient in 2007, growing his own medicine.

Hawkins also races drag cars and motorcycles and along the way has met three big out-of-state investors — one is a lawyer, another is in the adult entertainment business — who supply up-front capital for the stores.

"Like anything, there is a risk," says Hawkins, "but you deal with it. From what I hear, in four years it’s going to be an $85-billion industry. In four years I’ll be 50 and hopefully retired."

— Tom Mooney

Seeing who's who

Sherief Reda

PROVIDENCE — Associate Prof. Sherief Reda has a joint appointment at Brown University in engineering and computer science.

In his "reconfigurable computing" class, he teaches students how to design circuits so a computer can run algorithms much faster than an ordinary system could.

One of his former master’s degree students, Luis Camacho, turned to him recently for help, and together they’ve won $50,000 from the Rhode Island Commerce Corporation’s Innovation Vouchers program.

Camacho, a design engineer for the Smithfield-based Videology Imaging Solutions, knew his former professor had technical expertise.

In essence, they’re making cameras that can scan a person’s iris, use algorithms to process that image and then determine whether the person in front of the camera is authorized to gain entry — at an airport, for example, or a secured building. They’re creating products for government entities and in the defense, banking and medical sectors.

Reda, 40, is originally from Egypt and now lives in Barrington. He moved to Rhode Island in 2006 to work at Brown after earning his Ph.D in computer science and engineering from the University of California, San Diego.

Reda has worked with companies before, and some have funded his past research: Intel, Qualcomm and AMD.

"Working with companies is good because it gives us opportunities to see the real-world constraints that might not be as visible in an academic setting," he said.

— Kate Bramson

Keeping the music alive

Kerri Kelleher

CRANSTON — When elementary school instrumental music died in the city's public schools, Kerri Kelleher and some like-minded parents struck up their own band.

Kelleher, 42, who lives with her husband and three children in the Dean Estates neighborhood, co-founded the nonprofit organization BASICS, as in Benefiting All Students In Cranston Schools. A fiscal crisis had brought the elimination of instrumental music instruction in 2009, and it was not expected to be restored for about five years.

"I’d rather jump out the window before I figure out whether I have a parachute," said Kelleher, who is widely seen as the spark plug of BASICS, which she serves as president. "We thought it had to be done, so we just did it."

The first year BASICS arranged for parents — for a fee — to have their fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders taught stringed instruments in after-school classes in school buildings. They had a full band program, too.

Added later were singing, in the form of a glee club, and guitar instruction.

The schools reinstated instrumental music in 2015, but BASICS endured because its clients wanted more, according to Kelleher. Entering its seventh year, BASICS has educated more than 1,000 children.

No longer needing to fill a void, BASICS now offers enrichment. That includes art classes and "community-building," which means, for the most part, getting children involved in volunteerism for charities.

Another part of the original mission remains: advocacy. BASICS has fought for, among other things, a cease-fire in litigation over the school fiscal crisis and safer walking routes to school.

— Gregory Smith

Harvesting more wind

Neal Fine

EAST GREENWICH — There’s a general rule in the wind-power business: to reduce the cost of power, build a bigger turbine.

So manufacturers have done their best in pursuit of that goal, going from 660-megawatt models like the one at Portsmouth Abbey that went up in 2006 to the six-megawatt behemoths that Deepwater Wind installed in the waters off Block Island just a few months ago.

The company has developed a blade-mounted device that can improve the efficiency of turbines and, according to founder and CEO Neal Fine, increase their power output by as much as 20 percent.

Fine, an expert in fluid dynamics with a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and experience working for the Navy and NASA, took technology developed at the University of Notre Dame and tweaked it for the wind industry. The Aquanis design features a "plasma flow actuator" that uses voltage differences between two electrodes to induce air flow. In short, the computer-controlled device can make a turbine blade more aerodynamic and durable.

"It can allow turbines to react almost instantly to changes in the wind," Fine said.

Competitors have come up with movable flaps like those on airplane wings, but Fine says the strength in his company’s device is that it doesn’t depend on moving parts that could break down.

Aquanis won a $224,969 grant from the National Science Foundation that followed a $200,000 grant in July from the Slater Technology Fund. The money is being used to revamp the design of the actuator, which will include testing at Brown University. Once that’s completed, the next step is having one of the devices installed on a wind turbine, which could happen in the next year. Fine says there's interest from some of the major manufacturers, such as Vestas and General Electric.

— Alex Kuffner

Building lean and green

David Caldwell Jr.

JAMESTOWN — The steel-frame, net-zero house under construction on a waterfront lot here is the latest green building project undertaken by retired Marine Capt. David Caldwell Jr., president of the Rhode Island Builders Association.

The property owner uses recycled and locally sourced materials. For instance, the kitchen cabinets are being made by Martin Woodworks in West Warwick. But German-made, highly insulating windows with an R-10 rating, and a Swiss-made HVAC system, are also part of the plan, designed by C & H Architects of Amherst, Massachusetts. Caldwell explained that when houses are sold in Germany, they have to meet the country's strict energy efficiency standards. As a result, he said, many building products there deliver superior energy performance.

"It is a net-zero house with some European technology being built in the most environmentally conscious manner possible," Caldwell explained. A net-zero building is one that uses roughly the same amount of energy that it creates renewably. The home will run on electric power from solar energy collected from photovoltaic panels on the roof.

The North Kingstown company co-founded by Caldwell's father, Caldwell and Johnson Custom Builders and Remodelers, now specializes in sustainable building. For Caldwell, the issue is personal. After serving in the Iraq War, he came to believe the United States should refrain from interventions for the sake of oil and instead embrace alternative energy and sustainable building practices.

Although his Jamestown project is a luxury home, Caldwell has demonstrated that green housing doesn't have to be expensive. In 2010, he rebuilt a ranch house in North Kingstown, which he later listed for $259,900. He said it cost just $5,000 more for upgrades that allowed the house to meet four different green building standards.

He co-founded the company in Providence in 2001 with his wife, Kelly Driscoll. They are graduates of Rhode Island School of Design and were teaching when they began the company. Five years ago, while collaborating with Stanford University and seeing value in having a presence in Silicon Valley, Digication expanded to Palo Alto, California.

Digication started out as a reflective tool for their students, not as a product to sell. Inspired by their experiences at RISD, Yan and Driscoll wanted to help students learn how to learn. Yan noticed that for much of the world today, education is about consuming content. Through portfolio-making, Digication shifts the emphasis by allowing students to reflect on what they have learned and encouraging them to integrate that knowledge into their lives.

As they developed the tool, Yan and Driscoll considered the impact it might have on students in all areas of study, not just in art and design.

More than 6,000 schools nationwide, from K-12 to colleges and universities, use Digication, including the Rhode Island School of Design, Brown University, Yale University and Stanford University.